Still Dead ...

In the earliest days of Saturday Night Live, Chevy Chase wrote and presented the mock newscast, "Weekend Update."  This was the mid-70s, and Spanish Dictator Francisco Franco had only recently died after a half-century of rule.  He was a central figure in World War II and much of international politics thereafter, so his death brought the expected media frenzy.  Chase, mocking this, would announce each night that Francisco Franco was "still dead."



Recently, actor James Gandolfini unexpectedly died at 51.  In keeping with my recent post on what people did at my age (52), and the Tom Lehrer joke I opened with ("When Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years"), lets see who went before my time.

As I noted in the post, Czar Nicholas II met up with Bolshevik bullets at 50.  Lenin made it to 54, as an aside, but that puts him out of the running here.

The youngest elected President, John Kennedy, was killed by only two of Lee Harvey Oswald's bullets at the age of 46.  Oswald, shot some days later, was 24.  Also killed in that period (stunning to look back at the chaos of it now): Martin Luther King, Jr., 39, and Robert Kennedy, 43.

Let's see, speaking of chaos and violence, John Dillinger was 31 when shot by FBI agents outside the Biograph movie theater in Chicago after watching "Manhattan Melodrama."  To this day, in the simulated town where FBI agents train in Quantico, Virginia, the theater marquee announces that movie.

Bonnie and Clyde were in their 20s when killed in Texas.  Lester "Baby Face" Nelson was killed at 25.  Al Capone died at 48.  Odd, I thought he had lived to old age, but syphilis and other health problems did him in after he served his time in Alcatraz.  

Legendary war photographer (though he did his share of Hollywood stories, nearly marrying Ingrid Bergman in the process) Robert Capa was only 40 when he stepped on a landmine in Viet Nam in 1954, and his colleague David "Chim" Seymour, who died two years later in the Middle East, was 45.  Larry Burrows, another great war photographer, died at 44 when his helicopter crashed into Laos.  With him were AP's Henri Huet, 43, Kent Potter of UPI, 23, and Keisaburo Shimamoto, 34, a freelancer for Newsweek.  

However, photographers (to my intense relief) seem to live longish lives: Mathew Brady was around 74 (they're not too solid on his birth year), Alexander Gardner was 61, Richard Avedon was 81 when he died in 2004 and  Irving Penn was 92.  LIFE's Alfred Eisenstadt was 96, W. Eugene Smith was 60 and Robert's brother Cornell Capa was 90, and Margaret Bourke-White was 67 when she passed from Parkinson's.  Henri Cartier-Bresson, the great street photographer, was 95 in the end.  But we're getting off the point.

Shakespeare (if he existed) was 52 at death, just on the mark, though Christopher Marlowe, who some think actually wrote the plays, was only 29 when stabbed to death in a pub.  King Henry V of England (who gave the great St. Crispin's Day speech in Shakespeare's play about him) was only 36, while the villainous Richard III died at 33, willing to trade his kingdom for a horse.  (Ironically, his remains have since been found beneath a parking lot near the old battlefield where he died.)  The last King, George VI, was 57 when he died in 1952.  His successor, Elizabeth II, remains healthy at 87.

John Lennon was only 40 when shot by Mark David Chapman in 1980 (again, I thought him older, but then I was only 19 when it happened).  And though "Woody" Guthrie was 55 when he succumbed to ALS, Lou Gehrig -- the man who's name is generally associated with the disease -- was only 37 at death.  Beethoven made it to 57, Bach to 65, and Mozart, by the way, was 35 when he died from a fever, not poisoning.  (Sorry, fans of "Amadeus.") Tom Lehrer is still alive, and has a website.  He's 85.

Oh, and Francisco Franco (still dead) was 83.